Category: people

“I would say aged 37 I went through a complete midlife crisis. There’s this thing with an artist, you have to be very careful your self worth is not bound with your work. You’re not a bad person if you get one star. I started to meditate and I’m very proud of that and I started to work with a different community of people, and I started to work in service and sat with people in a hospice who were dying of cancer, I worked with Zen Bhuddist monks, I started to teach more.”

Playbill helps us bid farewell to David Bowie and Brian Bedford, Patti Duke and Patrice Munsel, Edward Albee and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and all too many more.

“[The] novelist, travel writer, essayist, and biographer … the 50th anniversary of whose death rolled around this year, celebrated by those survivors who had the misfortune of knowing him at all well, was as wretched and ornery a human being as anyone could be who was not actually moved to suicide or murder.”

The young demimonde celebrity of the ’00s had a hell of a backstory, which turns out to have been made up by a middle-aged “fat Jewish girl” from Brooklyn. (Her sister-in-law made the public appearances in a red wig.)

Before she became known to a younger generation as Carrie Fisher‘s mother, Reynolds was one of America’s biggest stars – on stage, screen, and turntable – of the 1950s and ’60s. (Not to mention being the most famous of the women who lost their husbands to Elizabeth Taylor.)

A new book of his writing, edited by his son and a Judd Foundation archivist, shows the artist as “a deeply read student of history who tended to believe Western culture hadn’t yet emerged from the Middle Ages and that, more than people cared to acknowledge, violence, oppression and ignorance continued to be societal defaults.”

“Jeffrey Slonim didn’t shout. While the other red carpet reporters tried to get the attention of celebrities by yelling their names, he usually waited for them to come to him. And they usually did.”

The woman who played Princess (and General) Leia, wrote Postcards from the Edge, spent decades punching up scripts in Hollywood, and made it OK to publicly speak about mental illness, suffered a heart attack on a plane ride from London to Los Angeles on Dec. 23 and died on the morning of Dec. 27.

“Most known for his mastery of the cello, his recordings of works by Bach, Shostakovich and Brahms earned him several prestigious music prizes. Later in life, Schiff turned increasingly to conducting after health problems ended his solo career.”